The German Component to American Industrialization Images

Today known as the Athenaeum, Das Deutsche Haus was built in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, between 1893 and 1898 for the…

Photograph of the Pabst Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ca. 1890s.

Photograph of the Germania Brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania. German immigrant Benedict Nuding founded the firm in 1878, and Lewis F.…

Photograph of the front façade of the Germania Brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania. German immigrant Benedict Nuding founded the firm in…

1937 photograph of the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, New Hampshire. During the nineteenth century, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company had been…

1909 photograph by Lewis Hine of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company mills during the noon hour. The image shows male and…

Twentieth-century photograph of the August Schell Brewing Company brew house in New Ulm, Minnesota. Schell, a German immigrant, founded the…

The era from 1840 to 1893 was a momentous one both for German-American immigration and for U.S. industrialization, so it bears examining to what extent the two developments were interrelated. This essay will first sketch out the contours of German immigration and American industrialization in this era. It then identifies areas of the U.S. economy where Germans were particularly concentrated, and examines the industrial and geographic niches where transatlantic connections were of greatest consequence. Shifting focus from global to individual patterns, it then explores what was German and what was American about German-American entrepreneurship in the mid- and late nineteenth century.

German Population of the United States, 1872 From The Statistics of the Population of the United States, Compiled from data…